Due to a series of structural errors by the police and the Public Prosecution Service, Peter R. de Vries, Marengo lawyer Derk Wiersum and the brother of key witness Nabil B. were not properly protected. That reports RTL News Wednesday on the basis of a draft report from the Dutch Safety Board (OVV) that it has in its hands. Due to the failure of the services, Ridouan Taghi’s gang could have struck several times. The OVV does not want to confirm the conclusions of the report NRC.
RTL News reports a series of incidents from the draft report that, according to the OVV, would prove that the Public Prosecution Service failed in its protection responsibility. For example, a security guard at the garage where De Vries regularly parked warned that a man with ‘striking tattoos’ was chasing the crime journalist. The police viewed the security footage and did not see the man, even though he was indeed captured.
Security requests declined
According to the OVV, the security of the family of Marengo crown witness Nabil B. is also insufficiently protected. From a reconstruction of NRC from the negotiations between Nabil B. and the government about the crown witness deal, it appeared earlier that the Public Prosecution Service had rejected requests for personal protection from two of B.’s brothers on two occasions. Two days after the last request, one of the two brothers, Reduan, was shot dead in his business premises in North Amsterdam. The Amsterdam detective would have offered to protect the family, but the Public Prosecution Service did not think that was necessary. B.’s family had been warning for years about the threat of Taghi’s criminal gang.
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The threat assessment for lawyer Derk Wiersum, who assisted Nabil B., was lowered after Reduan’s death in the summer of 2018 because both he and the security services believed that lawyers are replaceable, and therefore not a logical target for a criminal organization . According to RTL Nieuws, the OVV calls this “an untested assumption”. Only the police continued to patrol his home, at first once an hour and later six times a day. Because essential threat information via the Summ-IT police system was subsequently overlooked, Wiersum was able to be shot dead by a hitman on September 18, 2019 near his home.